A federal appeals court has reversed the conviction of a researcher who was accused of hiding work he did in China while employed at the University of Kansas.
Feng “Franklin” Tao was convicted in 2022 of three counts of wire fraud and one count of making a materially false statement.
Tao was among two dozen academics who were charged as part of the “China Initiative”, which launched in 2018 during former president Donald Trump’s administration that aimed to counter suspected Chinese economic espionage and research theft.
U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson threw out the wire fraud convictions a few months later but let the false statement conviction stand.
The appeals court recently ruled on Thursday that the government failed to provide sufficient evidence that Tao’s failure to disclose his potential conflict of interest actually mattered.
The legal case led to him being fired and banned from all KU-affiliated campuses, on top of nearly bankrupting his family.
